Several open source applications are available on both Linux as well as Windows. This gave Mohammed Saleh the idea of comparing the performance of various of these applications on both Ubuntu 8.04 as well as Windows XP SP3, to see which of the two performed better with certain applications. The results were rather interesting.

I'd say if one believes to have the technical knowledge to produce acceptable benchmarks, then (s)he should also have the technical knowledge to custom compile a few things.

Well the one doing the benchmark could absolutely optimize both systems. But that wouldn't make sense for non-technical readers.

The point is that the default setup of Ubuntu and Windows is what's important to most people. My mother is a teacher in multimedia and she uses both WinXP and Ubuntu. She doesn't know what the kernel even is, let alone how to recompile it. So what she, and many others, are stuck with is the default configuration of her system. That's what matters. That's what I care about.

But sure, for tech-readers it may be interesting to see what you can get if you everything you absolutely can to get good results, including recompiling with optimized flags, configuring software or even change different parts of the system. I don't think that's what the author really aimed at, though.